Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

To increase the nullsec player income, you must nerf it

If you care to listen any nullsec pilot long enough to hear all his cries over Phoebe and the Entosis link, he'll get to the bottom-up incomes and the low nullsec income, usually dubbed as "nerf highsec income". He'll even mention that he had to start a highsec alt to make money.

This is wrong. Not "I don't agree with it" wrong, but "open an economy textbook" wrong. You see, the main nullsec bottom-up income is anomaly ratting. Sure, you can do missions in NPC null, but not in Sov-null. You can mine, but you can mine anywhere else too. Bounty-paying anomalies are the unique feature of nullsec (highsec bounties are pennies) and that's what most dwellers do: rat anoms. They aren't happy about their hourly wage and for a good reason: a highsec missioner makes the same and he don't have to care about neutrals, never called into fleets and can buy stuff in Jita instead of importing everything. Hence the "nerf highsec" sentiment.

What our economically challenged friends miss is that highsec missioners don't make much ISK. They make LP. They turn LP and ISK into faction items and implants. Then they sell it. The price they get is the price people with ISK give. Who has the ISK? The nullsec people, as they control the only serious ISK faucet of the game. So the truth is nullsec people gladly trade the fruits of one hour of ratting into the fruits of one hour of highsec missioning. They also gladly trade it for 5 minutes of trading, but that's besides the point.

The point is that this is unaffected by any kind of nerfs. What would happen if CCP would cut the LP payouts of highsec missions and incursions to half? Then missioners would be able to produce half as many TFIs for example, therefore their prices would rise to about its double and nullsec people would have to rat twice as long to buy one. At the end of the day, the hourly income of highsec missioners would still be similar to nullsec ratters (not exactly the same as WH people will have an effect, for example many players will switch from the expensive faction ships to T3).

Now the question is why the dangerous and uphill-in-the-snow nullsec life isn't more profitable than the easymode highsec life? Because of the multibox- and bot-ratting that prints ISK easily. These are the competitors of nullsec ratters. To shift the LP:ISK price ratio, you must shift the LP:ISK supply ratio. Do you want more valuable ISK? Decrease ISK supply! So to increase nullsec player income, you must nerf nullsec and not highsec! Removing local would hit botters and multiboxers much harder than it would hit players. A player is better in intelligently responding to threats, while bots are better in watching local. I mean, look at this:

Only a blind can't see that dead-end systems and constellations are busy with ratting, while systems connecting regions are not. Well, a traveler isn't dangerous, so there isn't more danger when he is around. The reason for hiding is that those who use local channel get scared from every random dude (see also: AFK-cloaking), so they avoid busy systems. Without local channel, they wouldn't undock at all, leaving all the ISK available in anomalies to players ratting in PvP-capable ships, in fleet. Sure, their ISK/hour will drop, but with the extremely decreased ISK supply, the value of ISK will be much higher (serious deflation).

So if you are a human player in nullsec, you should support taking away local and every other change that you'd hate but the botters hate more. Also, report every bot you see. They make you poor, not the highsec missioners!
There is another way to increase nullsec income: lure more new players to highsec, who will produce LP and minerals and will need ISK. This would also shift the LP:ISK supply in favor of nullsec. This would need non-wardeccable corps and better tutorials.

PS: I like these battles.This is even better: 3x outnumbering minions of Evil lost 3x more.
If only the "invasion fleet" would have numbers like this instead of losing to Celestii...

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

You can also get against this, if you decrease the bounty on systems with more than 500 rat deaths within the last 24 hours.The same was done for industrials, if the systems are heavily used for building, etc.

Gevlon, have you ever spent timer ratting in 0.0?There is no "harmless" traveller, busy systems are SHIT!

A pilot spends much more time warping to safe and back to anom then actually killing rats.

Still, fit a pvp-able ship.... Yeah, right, everyone should do it, especially in highsec and no ganks would ever happen????

Most pvp fit ships will be so inefficient against rats that it simply is not the solution.

It is not that botters hide in dead end systems, it is that dead end systems give all players a tiny bit more safety, at least on a psychological level.

It is funny that you rage so much against botters, but the worst bots are the well programmed TRADING BOTS!!!!! Trading needs a nerf too, the frequency of updating should be severely limited to once per hour. Or get removed completely.

Income situation will ALWAYS be an issue. Why? Find sth. that works ok and everybody does it. Find sth. that works great, but no one knows about, make a fortune, but risk that CCP will call it an exploit.

Pilots have found hundreds of awesome fits and tactics, but once it got known, ALL people copied it, CCP panicly reacts by crapnerfing fine working ships.

Why do people still rat in drakes in wh space?Because they can afford the loss of a crap drake, but a proteus or tengu would be far more expensive...

Instead of nerfing things, other things should get a boost.If a tengu is flown by so many pilots with such and such a configuration, boost some other subsystems so taht get worthy of being used...

If CCP want to make a serious change, remove plex, let people pay for the subs and give us purple shit for logging in thre day in a row or some other useless crap.

Price indices in EVE have far less to do with supply and demand than you want us to make believe...

Rats should be like the typical cheap ship gank boat. They have a "budget" of isk, and use the same parts player ships use. Some guy's job at CCP then is to make up rat fits based on what's effective in PvP and the budget for that rat type. Basically, that guy is "PvPing by proxy." To "tune the rats" you adjust the budget. It's a lot of work, but that's the price of a non-consensual PvP game... constant work.

Miners would start tanking their ships and using weaponed escorts REAL fast. Anom ratters would use ships effective against what the PvP players use. Boom. All problems solved.

@99smite: CCP has said continually that trading bots are *very* minor in their effect on the in game economy. The real problem in order of severity are: mission bot, mining bots, both problems existing predominantly in high sec.

Let's face it, trading is really nothing more than pushing money around the game board. No wealth is created or destroyed (except for PLEX trading).

You couldn't be more wrong about ratting in null sec anomalies vs. high sec missions. I made more isk then I ever have ratting anomalies in null sec and by the use of an ESS, I have more LP's then I'v ever earned doing missions in high sec. As it stands between the 4 factions, I have over 30 million LP's since the ESS came out and that's ratting conservatively. Nt to mention I make 600 mil per day ratting a couple hours p/day with a few characters.

The wealth that traders create is conveinence. Granted no physical isk or ship is created, but the ability to get what you need when you need it is valuable.

I can take this further too. Everything in eve online is pixels. Virtual. Doesn't really exist. So miners/missioners/industrialists are just moving stuff around too. (when you mine an asteroid, you arent "creating" veldspar, your just telling the game to slowly increase an integer.)